Google’s AI reading romantic novels to become more natural.

Yup, you read that right. Google is making an effort, as ever, to make virtual assistance as accurate as possible. But it’s also trying to make it more natural and verve, and in doing so have opted for a somewhat weird strategy. It doesn’t seems all that weird when you think of it, though.

Google has reportedly made one of its engines read 2865 romantic novels in hopes of making it more conversable. The folks at Google believe that romantic novels are the best way to learn conventional English as they are more colloquial than formal, have versatile vocabulary and are imaginative. All of this should make for a better conversation the next time we ask Google Now about something just a bit more than weather, or the news.

Romantic novels are simple and are easy to understand, most of the time, which is why they are the best way to help the artificial intelligence engine strengthen its neural network. This will intern help the system adapt to conversational tones. Of course, romantic novels can be a bit, let’s just say “inappropriate” at certain times which is why Google should, and probably is conducting extensive research to make sure they don’t run into embarrassments like the time Microsoft did with their teen bot, “Tay”.

In the 2013 romantic sci-fi drama, “Her”, a highly intelligent voice assistant is shown to have regular conversations with its user. It, or She, if you will, is shown to have a unique natural personality with instances of anger, guilt and many more emotions.
Whether Google’s strategy will actually work or not, we shall see.

Mahir Amer is a college student in Dhaka. He loves tech, designing, arts, sports and writing. Math and science too. He hopes to get admitted to an American University someday. Most of Mahir’s day is spent thinking about football or working on Adobe Illustrator. You can see his work at https://www.behance.net/mahiramer